working at the lake

Jul 09, 2013

Something I have not really tried too often but it is certainly easier than ever to try. Having a large number of clients accessing and relying on applications running in the cloud is a responsibility since at any given moment, an App could experience trouble and go down. I have tried various services to keep me informed when this happens but they themselves are suspect. I do not trust them much and the real problem is that even if they do reliably inform me of a problem, if I am out of cell phone service or Internet connectivity, the message ends up in a call to dev null.

For this summer, with the kids all raring to go and needing entertainment, it was obvious that moving the family unit to cottage country would be idea. I remembered a place that was recently constructed near Labelle, QC with deluxe chalets complete with wifi, and so that is now a brief homebase from which to both relax and work. The wifi keeps me in touch with the cloud and clients, and the nearby lake keeps me hopping between bathing suits and cutoffs.

A fridge full of beer, a BBQ ready to go at a moments notice, and some nice deck chairs overlooking the forest completes a nice working situation. I could do this full time, but I think the novelty would wear off quickly for the kids. That being said, we have barely explored the local area and intentions remain to explore more by horseback and bikes.

So far the issues of managing the business of cloud computing and client expectations while living closer to the wilds is a good thing.

For accounting purposes there are a couple of ways of dealing with selling and purchasing of inventory and the changes in the cost of purchasing inventory over time. It is rare that a merchant will purchase items to sell in their Shopify store for the exact same price over time. It can be important to use an average cost price that takes into account these purchasing price changes over time.

The Profiteer App is meant to expose profit or margins on a sale by subtracting the cost price of goods sold from the selling price of the goods sold. A common business issue faced by many merchants is the effect currency exchange rates may have on their sales. A shop located in Canada may sell products to Canadians in Canadian currency, but the products sold may have been purchased and imported from the United States. Many merchants probably source their products from the United States, and it is considered to be one of the standard currencies by which most others are measured.

Had a real laugher/shocker at the same time. I develop so much App code where the data processing is a flow and not a stop:persist:process:continue action that sometimes you get burned by that. Everything was working fine as “hey download all that shop’s orders, parse them, deal with the contents, and move on”. Everything as working fine on MY itty, bitty, little dev shop.

As a way of welcoming in the new year of 2014 and trying to decide which way was up from down, left from right, I made a decision to be a speaker at the local Montréal Ruby group. Having attended a dozen or more meetings over the years I felt like I had 20 minutes of quality material without being too technical, or wildly off of one topic.